Merge CE stable changes to EE #

Merge Train attempts to do this on a regular cadence. Make note that if you merge the default branch into stable at the right time, you might create a slight divergence that you need to take care of.

There are a few approaches to doing the CE->EE merge: CE X-Y-stable-patch-Z can be merged into the existing EE preparation MR, can be merged into a new MR to fix conflicts, or could even be merged into stable.

Keeping the stable branches clean can help if you unexpectedly need to do a security release on those branches. Beyond that the trade-offs are complexity, checking pipelines are green on the branch vs MR, and creating a workflow which allows you to do things quickly and in parallel.

To merge CE into the EE MR #

1. Check out an up to date X-Y-stable-ee-patch-Z branch in your local EE repo, or pull changes.

   git fetch origin
   git checkout -b X-Y-stable-ee-patch-Z origin/X-Y-stable-ee-patch-Z
   

2. Fetch X-Y-stable-patch-Z branch from CE ready for merging

   git fetch git@gitlab.com:gitlab-org/gitlab-ce.git X-Y-stable-patch-Z
   

3. Merge that branch into the current EE preparation branch

   git merge FETCH_HEAD
   

4. Optional: repeat previous two steps with X-Y-stable to double check that no new changes have been introduced outside of the CE preparation MR.

5. Optional: Create a new branch if you’d like to fix conflicts in a separate MR

6. Fix simple conflicts and push

   git push origin X-Y-stable-ee-patch-Z
   

7. Optional: Ask others to help fix conflicts in the MR. Engineers may need to create a new MR targeting the specific branch.